This week’s College Crosse Top 20 Poll saw a lot of movement this week, as opposed to our updated College Crosse Preseason Top 20 Poll from last week, which makes sense as we had more than twice the number of games this past weekend as we did opening weekend a couple weeks ago. With more games means more chaos and as The Kid Chris would say, “chaos is good for the body and soul.”

Just to review our pollsters for anyone new to our blog, this year we have Jack Goods (The Buffalo News), James Simmons (Troy Nunes), and Caroline Darney (SB Nation & Streaking The Lawn) voting alongside Chris, Marisa, Ryan, Adam, Jake, & myself. You can find our ballots from Sunday night in the graph directly below and the graph below our ballots is our official College Crosse Top 20 Poll for this week. Moreover, you can find some comments from Chris, Jake, & Ryan about their top 20 ballots below the Poll.

Additionally, we decided to do an elimination pool this year. The Pool’s rules are pretty simple (pick a team each week, if your team loses you’re out of the Pool, if your team wins you can keep playing but you can’t use the same team again), however, we did add one wrinkle to our Pool: You can only pick five B1G/ACC teams combined throughout the season. The only exception is that B1G/ACC conference games don’t count against the cap. So you can pick Virginia, when the Cavs play Syracuse on March 4th and it won’t count against your five B1G/ACC cap, however, you can’t use Virginia again for the rest of the season. I may have butchered the explanation of the exemption rule, but I think that’s what we finally agreed on. Anyway, let’s go to the ballots and Top 20 Poll for Week 2.

Ballots & Week 2 Poll.

Below is the official College Crosse Top 20 for this week. The number within the ()s indicates how many 1st place votes that team received this week.

Comments

Ryan

• Duke - Although I don’t want to penalize Albany for not playing a game, Duke has just looked flat out dominant in their 3 wins, so I gave them the bump to #1.

Chris

• Duke - To the people that doubted me putting Duke at 1: Lolz (although this could come back and haunt me if they play bad against Denver on Friday).

Jake

• Duke - They’ve looked tremendous. Guterding might be better than Wolf or Crotty were
• Albany - The Cuse game next week could be absolute gangbusters.
• Maryland -Lot of contributors on offense and the usual stout defense makes for a good start.
• Denver - We’ll learn a lot about them this Friday in Durham. Win that and they could be my #1 next week
• Yale- Their game vs Villanova is a sneaky good one next week.
• Ohio State - If they’re going to win faceoffs like they did last year, the Bucks will be trouble.
• Rutgers - Little shaky against St. John’s, but offense has predictably looked good.
• Syracuse - Binghamton is not good, but they looked a lot better than I expected. Can’t wait for the Albany game.
• Johns Hopkins - If they win faceoffs and get saves like they did yesterday, they’ll be in the Top 10 all year long.
• Notre Dame - Watching their offense is like getting your teeth pulled. They have a very good goalie.
• Army - Workmanlike effort by the Knights to start the year, as you’d expect.
• Virginia - They still can’t play a lick of D, but they might have a good goalie for the first time in years.
• Villanova - If they beat Yale, it’s time to start talking about them as a Big East contender.
• Penn State - Blew the doors off Hobart in the second half. Good bounce back win.
• North Carolina - If they don’t get that defense figured out, it’ll be a long year.
• Vermont - They have looked tremendous to start the year. Clear 2nd place in the America East.
• Loyola - When Spencer touches the ball, they’re special. When he doesn’t, they’re ordinary.
• Bucknell - Very strong start to the year. Bryant win could be good at the end of the year.
• Princeton - Trickier than usual start to the year with Monmouth. Still think this is the year before the year for them.
• Towson - Rough, rough start. But Nadelen will get it figured out as always.

Elimination Pool Picks